Posts Tagged ‘Mt. Bondone’

Winter is gone and we are in full ”spring” mode here in the Dolomites. Lots of flowers are right now blooming and the snow can only be found over 2000 mt of altitude. Still, I would like to post some pictures taken during the past winter. To be honest, the winter was a short one: in January and February we had almost every day blue sky and no fresh snow.

The image featured in this post was taken back in November 2010. It was taken at sunset from Mt Bondone looking westwards towards the Brenta Group. At the time there was a storm passing over the peaks that was side-lit by the setting sun.

The final image is the result of stitching together4 different frames. The process is not that automated as I thought. Although while processing the raw images I tried to keep the white balance similar for all the frames in the end the final result was not that good. I had to manually correct each single channel for the different frames to get to this.

As the title says, our winter season has started here in Trentino. Snow has arrived and at higher altitude is going to stay. After a couple of days of bad weather, we got a spell of two nice days in a row. Thus I decided to get out early an afternoon to go to the local sky resorts of Mt. Bondone. This place offers a nice view of the lake valley and the dramatic peaks of the Brenta Group. I’m fortunate enough to live and work near some spots that in the right light condition can turn out to be quite photogenic.

First Snow - Canon 5D, 24-105 f/4 L, 40mm@f/11, ISO 100. This is a manual blend of two exposures at 1.6 and 1 sec.

I arrived at my favourite spot 15 minutes before the sun would disappear behind a wall of clouds on the South-West. Here the view is westbound, where the clouds and the mountains were getting some modelling side light. Everything looked very promising. And then it happened. As the sun was getting lower the light was getting fierce on the clouds. I grabbed some 50 frames in the changing light until the show was over! Then, I rushed into my car to turn the heat on and de-frost a couple of fingers from my left hand. Still, what a nice time.